Emergency teams responding to the ongoing Ebola outbreak in Congo began on May 21 inoculating those most at risk of contracting the virus: health workers and people who have come into contact with Ebola victims. It’s the first real-world test for an experimental vaccine, rVSV-ZEBOV. In field trials in Guinea and Sierra Leone in 2015, this vaccine effectively protected people from Zaire...

Of 5,837 people in Guinea who received a single shot of the vaccine, rVSV-ZEBOV, in the shoulder, none became infected with the virus 10 to 84 days after vaccination. That’s “100% protection,” researchers report December 22 in the Lancet.

Of 5,837 people in Guinea and Sierra Leone who received a single shot of the vaccine, rVSV-ZEBOV, none became infected with the virus 10 to 84 days after vaccination. That’s 100 percent protection, researchers report online December 22 in the Lancet.

A single introduction of the Ebola virus led to most cases of the deadly disease in Liberia, a new genetic study suggests.

Researchers examined 165 Ebola genomes, most collected during the second wave of infection that started in late May 2014 in the West African country. The analysis, reported online December 9 in Cell Host & Microbe, adds missing information about how the virus...

A Liberian woman contracted Ebola in March by having sex with a survivor of the viral disease, researchers report. Using studies of both people’s viral genomes and of the people’s contacts with any other possible sources of the virus, the researchers conclude that the woman’s disease represents the first known case of sexual transmission of Ebola.

Ebola is back in Liberia more than a month after the country thought it was rid of the virus.

A 17-year-old man died on June 29 of a fever illness that was being treated as malaria. As part of Liberia’s Ebola surveillance, swabs from the young man were collected by a safe burial team. Tests revealed that the young man died of Ebola, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced July 3....

The fearsome Ebola virus may itself fall victim to two already approved medications — the antidepressant drug Zoloft and a drug for patients with heart problems.

Researchers tested roughly 2,600 compounds and found 30 approved drugs with some capacity to fight the virus in lab-dish tests. The team tested several of these drugs in mice and found that Zoloft, also called sertraline,and the...

The virus causing the current Ebola epidemic in West Africa is not evolving as quickly as some scientists had suggested.

In a paper last August, researchers reported that the virus (Zaire ebolavirus) was altering its genes almost twice as fast as it had during previous Ebola outbreaks in Central Africa (SN: 9/20/14, p. 7). However, a new genetic analysis shows that the virus is mutating...

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Genetic data are beginning to reveal how the Ebola virus causing the epidemic in Western Africa is evolving.

Scientists have deciphered the entire catalog of genetic data for 96 Ebola viruses taken from patients infected between June and September 2014. The results show that one particular clade, or type of the virus, is dominant among patients in Sierra Leone,...